Support for this podcast comes from Broadbeam, a smart, innovative global recruitment technology business which helps recruiters to reach candidates in a fast, effective and efficient way. I recently spoke with their client, James Purvis, head of talent acquisition at CERN, to find out what he loves about Broadbeam. What I love about Broadbeam is the ability to take decisions based on data. So instead of having to believe what the vendors provide you in terms of their information of how many candidates they're going to bring to you, you can really use the metrics of the tool to understand how many of the clicks turn into applications, how many of those applicants turn into interviews and how many become higher. So it's all about evaluating the quality and not just the quantity. To find out more, go to www.Broadbeam.com. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, and of all the ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 38 of the Recreating Future Podcast. One of the most common themes I hear in my conversations with in-house recruiters is their frustration at the failings of their recruitment technology. I'm delighted to have Brad Cook, Global VP of Talent Acquisition for Informatica, as my guest this week. Informatica have a well-deserved reputation for using recruitment technology brilliantly to drive their recruiting strategy forward. To find out how they do it, keep listening. Hi everyone, and welcome to another Recreating Future Podcast interview. My guest this week is Brad Cook from Informatica. Hi Brad, how are you? Hi Matt, how are you doing? Yes, not too bad, not too bad. It's a very dark, January evening where I am at the moment. I suspect it's probably a bit sunny out where you are. Well, actually not, I mean, California. I could be looking out the window thinking I was in the UK right now. It's dark and overcast and quite drizzly. Wow, that's certainly not normal. Do you want to give us a bit of background about you and what you do and how you come to be at Informatica? Sure. I've been in Informatica for just close on five years. Informatica is a big data cloud company where the leader in the data integration space has been for many years. We're about 5,000 people globally in 32 countries. I joined them from Cisco five years ago, and basically had to rebuild the organization. And we've been on track over the last five years at a home between six and 800 people a year in all those locations across all disciplines of the business sales, which I would probably say today is some of our challenging areas. R&D in major centers within the US, Redwood City, Silicon Valley, and Bangalore, our two major centers. And then we have some other tech centers around the world as well. So I've been here for five years in the same role as the longest job I've had in any one company. Cool. And you mentioned the challenges you're having in recruiting salespeople. What are those challenges and what sort of techniques and tools have you been using to overcome them? Well, I think that the biggest challenge we've had is that the market is so hot over here, especially Silicon Valley. As a company, Informatica has been through our own transition, we've gone from a publicly traded company of 20 years recently to a private company, private investor, held company. So the market is changing startups around their capital is cheap. So there's a lot of companies being acquired. With that, that means there's a lot of startup companies, which means a lot of call for all sorts of talent, not just engineering talent. Engineering talent has certainly been challenging in the Bay Area and in India. But across the world, I guess software is the new black. And everybody's looking for strong people that can sell software platforms. What we've been doing to get around that is building solid CRM platforms and solid information gathering, research gathering to know where the talent resides, whenever we want to go and do that. One of the things we've done over the last five years is actually build a research arm. So normally companies would have either full life cycle or sourcing, dedicated sourcing. We've also got once that further and built dedicated research into the organization. So we have a group in India who continuously are out there scaring the web or doing research on particular companies so we can go out there and find the name, the contact details. So we can bypass having to get to them through a link in email, because we all know LinkedIn is becoming saturated from a recruiter perspective to candidates. Analytics are getting inundated with contact requests. So we need to find other ways to get around them. And that's where I guess the CRM platforms and contact information becomes critical. I think that leads nicely onto my next question, because I've always, we met once a few years back and I've always been interested in your thoughts on recruitment technology and the kind of things that you've been doing. What tech do you use to support your recruitment efforts? What are the important elements within that? Well, I think over the five years my thoughts have definitely changed, but one of the most important things is, is the principle of capture once, use many. And working with a data integration company, what we do is not necessarily integrate all our platforms, but understanding the data that has been asked for or either for a candidate or that we may be collecting from a passive candidate, capturing it once in the news in the meantime. So the CRM platform becomes critical, but there's multiple aspects of this. There's the hunting down of the passive candidate or the passive prospect, and then there's also the active. So from a technology perspective, we'd have to make sure we're covering off both. From an active perspective, SEO is very, very critical. We've done a lot of work with SEO over the years. A lot of the talks and speeches I've done around SEO is still relevant today, and I think more so. One example is, in April last year 2015, Google made some changes to one of the algorithms and a whole lot of us in the industry started seeing massive drop-offs of people coming to the career site. That was around exactly the same time that Informatica was going private. We actually thought it was due to, well, we've gone private. When we started to dig into some IPs and some of their data as well, we found that the algorithm that Google had changed was actually stopping a lot of the SEO functions getting through. So we lost 50% of our traffic. So technology that allows me to see that becomes critical. Because if I wasn't monitoring visitors to my career site, visitors to apply, apply as all the way through to hire, I would never know whether there was a problem. Since then, we've actually changed our front end to our career site, put in thing on people, and done a lot of work in building SEO. There's a link. I can't remember off the top of my head from Google that you can put in your career site, and it will give you a scoring out of 100. You would guess Google's career site scores 9,000 out of 100. At the time, we were scoring 33. With just some simple changes, with SEO mindset focus, we've been able to get our career site back up to 87%. Fantastic. Out of 100. So it's a lot of those things you have to not just collect the data, but you want to be focused on measuring the data of where your traffic is coming from. We all have limited budgets, so wherever we're going to spend our money, we need to make sure we're getting our biggest bang for that. On the flip side, the passive side is if we're going out there and have a research organisation finding names and finding contact details, we need to be able to make sure we have somewhere to put them and collect them so the team can go back in and and tour them again in the future, collect once usually many times. So there's a lot of different technologies we leverage with that. The core, ATS, the CRM functionalities, the SEO front ends with their analytics platforms as well, along with PPC and also I think a lot of them are still sound quite basic. If you don't have the basics in place, you're not going to get the volume of traffic you need. Yeah, absolutely. I'll come back to ATS in a second because I'm interested in your thoughts on how that market's changing, but just to briefly pick up on analytics, I know that a lot of people in terms of recruitment marketing aren't necessarily tracking everything they should and they're certainly not using analytics in a predictive or particularly sophisticated way. How important have those analytics been to you and what kind of things have you been able to do from having that data? Yeah, so I think it's critical. If you can't measure something, it's an old manufacturing conversation. If you can't measure, you can't improve it. So metrics for us has been very critical. An old data point that we had years ago, we calculated this is probably 2011, but we needed on average, based on the vendor I was using at the time and their data from all of their 300-odd customers, we would need at least 300,000 visitors to our career site, number one. Of that 300,000, we would need at least a couple of thousand people to apply to actually have the close ratios that we have. That's being valid and we've continued to use that. We have probably half a million hits for a small company. We have probably half a million hits to our career site today. In the seven years prior to me getting here, we had, I think, 10,000 applies. We now have gone from 15 to 25 to 35. This year, we'll probably get 45,000 applicants because we've streamlined the apply process. If someone is going to take the time to apply, I want to make it as simple for them as possible. Number one, they're going to finish it and then, number two, I actually get their data that I can then use in the future. The most important thing is email address and phone number. It's usually a personal email address that someone is going to put in an apply versus their work address, which means I can get them in the future. We made some modifications over the years to not just ask a phone number, but specifically ask for mobile phone or cell phone number because every time I do a conversation somewhere, I always ask how long people have their cell phone for it. It's always five to six to 10 years. If you've got access to someone for seven to 10 years, that's a long time to be able to get back to that person. So those things become critical. Some other areas within the analytic space becomes critical is the drop-off rates. Years ago, I had a drop-off rate, which is pretty consistent in the industry, about 40% of my employers will drop up before they get to the end. We've continuously made improvements over the years and we're sitting between a five and a 10% drop-off rate, which means I get 90% of everybody that takes the time to apply. I get their information in my system, then I know I can go back to them and find them in the future if I need to. So, 45,000 applications. How do you protect your brand and make sure that those people are having a good experience and being communicated to you by your recruitment team? That's setting up some basic things. I think the most important thing there is then following the disciplines and following the methodologies of candidate experience all the way through. The activities that the talent board have been doing around the whole candy awards, we've been a participant of that from the beginning. I've been a candy board member for many years because of the work we've done around candidate experience. As soon as someone applies, we send them a little mini survey and a different touch points throughout the application process. We'll actually send a survey to someone. We have rules internally that if someone comes through a certain way, they'll be treated a certain way within an SLA. So, everybody, that's not something that one person can own. Everybody has to be behind the whole candidate experience. And to be honest, we missed one year. We missed and we slipped up in a few areas and we're all over it again now because I think at some point, we may have taken our eye off the ball and become a little bit complacent. So, we just won the candy awards in the UK. We missed this year in the US. So, we're back on looking at what is going on within the data, where are the things causing our problems and driving accountability back out to the recruiters. And then they know exactly what they need to do. And everybody's on board with that. Fantastic. Coming back to the ATS question. Obviously, there's been a lot of changes in the ATS market in the last couple of years with new, smaller Agile players coming in and challenging some of the legacy providers. What's your view on the ATS market and how it's developing? Yeah, it's gone through some changes. So, we've been on an applicant tracking system virtual edge since 2003 at the company. We're the second VE customer. And we only just removed it. And we only removed it because it was being sunsetted. It was being end of life. And they've turned it off, rest in peace virtual edge. So, over the last couple of years, I've actually gone out and done quite deep dives on what I would call the legacy ATS vendors. And when we weren't exactly sure VE was going to go away, we did a full analysis on all the legacy vendors at the time. And we decided based on what we saw back then, we stayed where we were. Then VE come along and said, "No, we are going to turn this off. Wow, we have to move." So, we already seen what we knew from the legacy vendors. So, we then started to aim our guns at the new vendors out there, the greenhouses, the smart recruiters, more of the smallest start-up type vendors. And what they were able to do and what we could see from them was chalk and cheek, whether that translates, I'm not sure. But it was so different from the legacy vendors in what they could do. What I'd built from a technology platform over the last five years, some would say, and a lot of us are in the same boat, was a Frankenstein. There was lots of point solutions, some things connected together, some things not. It was a Frankenstein, but it worked. And I've had a number of vendors say, "Well, you've got a Frankenstein that's really hard to do." No vendor out there has created the perfect platform yet. But I think the smaller start-ups, and that's where we've gone with smart recruiters, are going down that path. Smart recruiters for me has a marketplace within that allows vendors, and they've already got multiple vendors integrated already, to interconnect. So, the day we went live, we went live with, I think it was six or seven integrations straight out of the box. I actually changed some background tech vendors. Why? Because they were already pre-integrated into the platform, which made it a much more streamlined approach for the user, the candidate having to do the background check, but also for the recruiter to be able to trigger that background check and not have to go from multiple systems and double-key things. And that's the area that I think a lot of the newer start-up ATSs have, that more holistic view of all of the aspects you need, not just the applicant tracking side of things, which applicant tracking is really more for compliance than for recruiting, whereas a lot of these newer platforms are out there for how do we market to candidates, how do we drive more messages out there, how do we measure where things are coming from, and then the application process itself, and then the workflow of getting an candidate from point A to point B through the interview cycle to hire is much easier. Absolutely, and I, a number of people that I've sort of been talking to you recently, have really sort of shared that view in terms of how the market is developing. Again, I suppose that leads on to my next question. You guys have always had a reputation for innovation in what you do in terms of recruitment. What do you think's innovative right now? What does innovation sort of look like at the moment? What have you got on your radar? What's sort of a piquier interest? The innovation things for us, we did a lot of work around data collection in the past, and we still continue to do that. The area of focus for me is getting above the noise. Four or five years ago, not everybody was doing employment branding, because it was still relatively new, no one knew what it was. Years ago, everybody wasn't doing mobile career sites. Everybody now is doing them. The bar is rising considerably and very, very quickly. The area that I'm really focusing on these days is around the marketing side of things and getting out of how recruiting would do marketing normally, but into the way marketing does marketing. Amplification of employee voice. We have a number of technologies in house that allow employees and our recruiters that whenever messages come in, they're amplified through five people after their Twitter networks or their LinkedIn networks out to we're talking millions and millions of people to get brand awareness and information about the company in the front of lots of people to draw more people back in. So we're focusing a lot more on the marketing aspects of things, and then also teaching recruiters how to be marketers first. If you can't market what you do and you can't promote the marketing aspects of the company, the job, you as a personal branded individual recruiter, you're not going to attract the property we're looking for. So teaching them to be marketers first, when they then get the talent in front of them, they're trying to hunt down, then they can put their recruiting hat back on. And that's a big change you're doing on that front as well. Last question, and I think you may have actually already answered it, but with all the kind of technologies that's available and the analytics and the way that things are going. Lots of people talk about replacing some of the role of a recruiter with technology or we get with algorithms. Do you think that's ever going to happen? Or is that a human aspect still absolutely vital? Can you ever say never? I don't think in my lifetime. I just don't think in my lifetime. I think technology has its place to be able to filter things down. Machine learning can go so far, but that human aspect. I know if I get to somewhere I need a place to call into and I just end up with an IVR or call center and I don't talk to a person, I'm pressing zero because I want to talk to a body and I think recruiting is still that personal touch. And I often talk about the science versus the art. The art of recruiting is a learned art. Some people are great at that sales approach and they interact and we candidate. The science side of it, I think we can automate as much as we can, but I don't think in my lifetime we're going to see a recruiter being replaced by some technology. People are people if we look at society today and kids are coming out with not a lot of social skills because they're doing everything digitally. I think maybe in the future when the kids think that's okay, well maybe that would be okay in the future, but I think not in my lifetime. Brad, thanks very much for talking to me. Pleasure. Have a great time. My thanks to Brad Kirk. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes, subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about me at www.RFpodcast.com. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week. I hope you'll join me. [Music]
Matt Alder talks to Brad Cook of Informatica
One of the most common themes I hear in conversations with in house recruiters is their frustration at the failings of their recruitment technology. A decade and a half on from the online recruitment revolution many employers are finding that their technology is holding them back rather than being the enabler it should be.My guest this week is Brad Cook, Global VP of Talent Acquisition for Informatica. Over the last five years Informatica have harnessed their CRM and ATS to win the battle against the global skill shortages in the talent markets where they operate proving that recruitment technology can be used strategically rather than just reactively. In the interview we discuss: • Brad’s philosophy of capturing data once and using it many times • Why you need an SEO mindset to attract active candidates • The importance of analytics • How Informatica have reduced friction in their apply process to capture data from 45k applicants a year • Why candidate experience is critical • The one piece of data you must collect from each prospect • The current revolution in the ATS market that is driving a move away from legacy vendorsBrad also empathises the importance of humans at all stages of the recruitment process and makes it very clear that recruitment is not just a science it is also an art.Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
